Re: XML and GNOME community

[Daniel Veillard w3 org]

> I have been browsing through the gnome world and found very few places
> where XML and related standards are mentioned.
> And now I wonder is there any interest at all in XML in the gnome
> community ?

  Ok, I guess I really need to reply on this one, even if I'm not (yet !)
a gnome developper... read on

> It seems that Netscapes mozilla and big brothers all applications
> (explorer, excel, powerpoint, word.etc)
> are going to use XML instead of HTML but also as a mechanism to store and
> transfer
> meta info about  components, plugins etc. MS have already showed examples
> of how
> to copy-paste and embedd and link using XML as metadata carrier.

  That's was one of the question I asked to Miguel after his (against all
odds) presentation a Linux Expo. Let's face it most of the text documents
are available now in HTML and XML is really about to get as popular but
will embrace a far larger range of documents. We need native XML support
on the desktop tools, there is some good and free code for XML parsing
and raptor engine from Mozilla will have XML support. One of the important
things about XML (and to a less extent HTML) is that those are structured
documents (see the whole thing as a tree with text in the leaves, that's
a good while incomplete model). Moreover, the DOM (Document Object Model)
is defining a common API to manipulate such structured document. I guess
that DOM support is also planned for Mozilla. One of the nice thing about
all this is that by implementing HTML and XML parsers + a DOM compliant
object model for these document, any tool on the desktop should be able
to read-write and display (using Raptor) HTML and XML documents, by 
using the parser and DOM Corba APIs.
  I would definitely be happy to help, I already have some simple but
usable XML parser code (pure C) and I would definitely join the programmer
team if there is some interest in developping such tools and interfaces.
As Miguel can certify, I have been working with structured document code
for quite a while, and I can certainly help on the design phase too to
avoid getting caught with common pitfalls when designing structured
document model and APIs.

A bunch of URLs:
   http://www.w3.org/XML/
   http://www.w3.org/DOM/
   http://www.mozilla.org/newlayout/

Daniel

P.S 1: I tried it only recently but I really love Gnome, good work guys.
P.S.2: For the distribution, first avoid -z9 on CVS use rather -z3 which put
       less stress on the server. Also a nightly full tar.gz (with the
       CVS subdirectories) of the full development tree would be extremely
       usefull, you're going through the same problems as the Mozilla source
       release (hey popularity increase :-) and I would tend to use
       the same solutions (-z3, tar.gz + CVS ...).
-- 
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